


frost and fire

by shuofthewind



Series: Of Blood and Dust [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1.01/1.02-centric, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials, Drabble, Gen, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:55:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bader spends most of his time curled up by her feet while Peggy's at her desk, because she knows it makes the men uncomfortable to see him. He’s larger than most grey wolves, and the long scar along his cheek makes him look more risky, somehow. People still persist in calling him a dog—if they talk about him at all—but they can’t escape the fact that her daemon is more bruised and battered and just plain dangerous than the rest of them combined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	frost and fire

**Author's Note:**

> _Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire._
> 
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> \--Emily Bronte, _Wuthering Heights_
> 
> Unbeta'ed, sorry.

She has the most aggressive daemon in the whole of the office, and nobody ever acknowledges it.

Bader spends most of his time curled up by her feet while Peggy’s at her desk, because she knows it makes the men uncomfortable to see him. He’s larger than most grey wolves, and the long scar along his cheek makes him look more risky, somehow. People still persist in calling him a dog—if they talk about him at all—but they can’t escape the fact that her daemon is more bruised and battered and just plain _dangerous_ than the rest of them combined.

The only one who even comes close is Sousa, and she spends the first three months he’s been assigned to the New York office thinking that the snake that lingers around his throat is just a very long garden snake until the serpent lifts her head one day to flare her hood at Krzeminski. Sousa catches her eye after Krzeminski and his terrier beat a hasty retreat, and cocks a brow, and Peggy has to smother a smile as she looks back down to her files again.

Later, she overhears Krzeminski and another agent talking about her “puppy-dog daemon” and Sousa corrects them sharply enough for her to know that he’s angry at their misconceptions. Peggy’s not sure what to make of that—if she should be leery of Sousa and his cobra partner, or not—but Bader begins to sit between Peggy and Sousa during meetings, always on Sousa’s bad side, so Krzeminski can’t accidentally-on-purpose drive his foot into Sousa’s stump.

In spite of all of that, she carries coffee and alphabetizes files and digs her heels into people’s toes whenever she can, and she _does not think_ of the dead captain with his dead Alsatian daemon that still haunts their waking steps.

She does _not_.

.

.

.

Colleen’s the one who introduces her to the L&L Automat, even though Colleen herself never comes here anymore. They actually first met up for coffee here, when Peggy was first looking for a place to live in New York. Angie is lazily stroking Peter’s crest when she and Bader traipse in, and Peter—who can part almost unnaturally far from Angie; Peggy’s not sure if it’s because he’s a bird or because he and Angie are special, somehow—always sits on the edge of Peggy’s table while she’s there. Angie can deal with men smacking her bottom while she’s on shift, but not with men trying to touch her daemon.

Peggy doesn’t want to know if men have tried. She thinks that the fact that Peter sits with her is enough evidence of _that_ conclusion.

When she returns to the table after collecting her pie ( _Steve’s fault,_ she thinks, looking at it with a knife in her gut; Steve would always bring back pie if he found it on a mission, or they stopped in Paris, or—) Peter scrapes his long nails over his cheek, and then says, “Man left that for you.”

He tilts his head at the napkin by Peggy’s plate. Peggy and Bader exchange a look, and then Bader says, “Who?”

“Dunno,” says Peter, and tilts his head the other way. “Just a man. Brit. Back way,” he adds, and Peggy leaves her pie for Peter as she crumples the note tight in her fist.

.

.

.

Edwin Jarvis’ daemon is a small grey tabby with snazzy markings around her whiskers. She spends the entirety of the car ride to Howard’s boat curled in Jarvis’ lap. Her name, Peggy learns later, is Suzan, but for now she is just an anonymous daemon like Jarvis is an anonymous man, an ally trusted by Howard Stark to help engineer his escape.

Contrarywise, Sylph is so tremendously excited to see her that she spends the entire trip ricocheting around the vehicle. The hummingbird flares her wings and natters in Bader’s ear and buzzes about as if she’s eaten raw coffee beans, and it’s the only indication that Howard might actually be happy to see her. She would never have known, otherwise. There are rings under his eyes and he’s stern, so much sterner than she remembers, flat and harsh in a way that she can’t remember him being even in the depths of the War. When he hugs her, Sylph lights on his shoulder and whispers “ _Be safe_ ” into her ear.

It feels almost like a kiss, which is something she’s never wanted from Howard, but will take gladly from Sylph.

.

.

.

The thing about Steve and Linde is that even when Steve was small, and faint, and weak (though he was never weak, she thinks, his body betrayed him the same way all bodies betray, the same way hers does, hiding her mind in the guise of something that others feel free to dismiss), Linde never truly was. She can remember Steve and Bucky laughing over a long-ago fight where Steve had lain bleeding, and Linde had stood over him with her hackles raised, bristling and bloody and beautiful, black and tan and furious. It had frightened off the bully just enough to let Bucky take care of him, Bucky and his Scarlett who knocked the man’s jackal daemon over and held it down with one huge cougar’s paw. They laughed at the story, but Peggy can see it still, the man everyone could see as dangerous, and the man that nobody ever expected to win.

Steve never mentioned what happened to Scarlett, that day on the train. Bucky and Scarlett had been severed by Armin Zola, but never rebound, not like Steve and Linde were. The Vita-Rays had given Steve his soul back, whereas Bucky never truly found his again. It haunts her, that notion, and at night when she wakes trembling from nightmares Peggy buries her face in Bader’s fur and hopes that whatever happened on that plane, Linde never left Steve again.

She can still hear them screaming.

.

.

.

Spider Raymond gets his name from his daemon, a tarantula that clings to his collar as Peggy peels herself off his lap and heads for the safe. La Martinique is just dark enough that Bader can pass himself off as a shaggy dog, or some kind of crossbred creature that nobody can ever identify, as long as he keeps his head down. He’s sure to, especially with that _bloody_ photographer and that _bloody_ man Thompson lurking downstairs, and Peggy lets him into the taxi cab first. There’s no point in anyone recognizing him. Not now.

.

.

.

Colleen’s daemon is a monarch butterfly, and he turns to the faintest scrap of Dust just as Peggy leaves the bathroom to find Colleen bleeding from a hole in the head. She thinks that small glimmer of gold might stain her hands forever.

The man in the green suit has no daemon, and her skin is _screaming_ when he touches her, Bader howling, and she grabs the frying pan and _slams_ —

.

.

.

Bader snarls at the sight of the man in the milk truck. He _snarls_ , and Peggy takes a split second to look down at him, trying to work out what’s made him so furious. Then he snaps, “ _Daemon_ , Peg, _daemon—_ ” and when she looks up she sees what Bader has already sensed, the sick creeping sensation that this man has no voice and no soul, and it _terrifies_ her. Two men in two days with no daemons. A flash of memory burns in her head like acid, a concentration camp in Poland that had held some of Zola’s work. There had been files there, files upon files of Jews who were severed, Jews who had their daemons killed in front of them, Jews who had their daemons tortured and burned and desecrated. Files and film clips and photographs, detailed anatomical drawings and thorough notes, and they had taken up full rooms. Bottled Dust, like little urns for daemons gone, had filled up another room, and Steve had been quietly sick in the hall at the sight of it.

Something reaches into her stomach and _twists_.

“Leviathan,” the man with no daemon says, and Peggy seizes that and clutches it to her, because it’s easier to fight than a tragedy, a horror, that has already been and gone.

.

.

.

Suzan perches on Jarvis’ shoulder as they step out of the car and look on the wreckage of Roxxon’s chemical refinery. Bader presses close against her side, whining a little, nudging his head up under her hand. “That could have been really bad,” he says, and Jarvis jumps in surprise next to her before looking down at Bader. Peggy’s not particularly sure what Bader’s thinking, talking in front of a man they barely know, but then on Jarvis’s shoulder, the tabby cat Suzan swipes a paw over her whiskers and says, with a delicate shudder, “Well, that’s all very well, but Mr. Stark’s car is _ruined._ ”

Jarvis makes a sound that can be nothing other than a whine, high-pitched in the back of his throat, at the sight of the missing bumper. Peggy ducks her head to hide a grin behind her hair.

.

.

.

That Damned Radio Show has her daemon pegged as a harmless sparrow.

Bader pulls his teeth back and laughs every time he hears the sound effects man trying to tweet.

Angie has no idea what’s so funny.

.

.

.

  
“You two can’t do this alone, you know,” says Jarvis, when he’s kneeling in front of her with a needle and thread in his hands. Suzan has settled herself on the arm of a nearby chair, and is peering over her paws at the streak of blood running down Peggy’s thigh. She turns her face away from both of them, running her fingers through Bader’s fur, tracing the edge of his scar. “You shouldn’t have to.”

Peggy bares her teeth, wondering if they’re smeared with blood or lipstick. Perhaps both. “Steve could.”

“If I may say so, Miss Carter, there are any number of things in common between you and the late Captain Rogers—” he tugs at the thread, so she can pretend that the sudden stabbing gasp that breaks from her is from the new stitch rather than the clinical way he said Steve’s name “—but there is one which is, perhaps, the most striking.”

“Is it that we can both get stitched without crying?” she says, through her clenched jaw.

Bader huffs.

“No.” Jarvis’ voice is exceptionally and irritatingly soft as he knots his stitches. They’re quite neat, she thinks, for a man who near fainted at first sight of a bullet wound. “I remember seeing a photograph of Captain Rogers during the war, one of the few that was used in newspapers that actually included his daemon, and I was quite struck by it, the first time I saw you, Miss Carter. The pair of you share daemons.”

Peggy and Bader exchange one long, questioning look. Then Bader says, “I’m fairly certain you’re wrong, there.”

“You misunderstand.” Jarvis takes up a handkerchief, wiping blood off his fingertips. “It’s not species that I speak of—quite obviously, there are strong differences there—but—forgive me, but when I was a younger man, before the war, I…studied daemons. I suppose that’s the best term for it, though it was in no way academic, and it was mostly at private moments when I could sit back and contemplate what exactly I had managed to get myself into with this person or that person or that group.”

Peggy stands, and tests her weight on her bad leg. It screams, but she can at least balance in her heels, and that’s all that matters. “The point, Mr. Jarvis. I assume there is one.”

“Canines are pack animals, Miss Carter. Bader,” he adds, inclining his head to her daemon. “Wolves, dogs, jackals, coyotes, all of them run with family groups. It’s possible to find a lone wolf, of course—” he nods at Bader again, and on the chair, Suzan begins to purr in a husky, rough little voice “—but it is rare.”

Peggy grabs her jacket. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I mean what I said earlier, Miss Carter.” Jarvis stands, and tucks the stained handkerchief into his pocket. “Lone wolves may run faster and further and, yes, are ultimately very dangerous, but—but a _pack_ , that’s more dangerous by tenfold. By a hundredfold. Whatever you can do alone, whatever Captain Rogers could do alone, it’s doubled or trebled in tandem with others.” He catches her eye, and holds it. “All I ask is that you do not forget that.”

She looks at her hands, at the chipped polish she’ll have to fix before work tomorrow. Then she jerks her head, once, and limps out the door to Howard Stark’s flat.

She does not sleep that night.

.

.

.

Sometimes she wishes that she’s a wolf in truth. She used to wake from dreams as a girl of her and Bader (who had taken wolf form often enough before settling that everyone knew what she would be long before she ever did) playing as pups. In that twilight place between consciousness and sleep she can feel fangs in her mouth, feel fur beneath her skin.

She is only half a human. She is all person and Bader is all wolf, but Bader is her soul, her soul in living flesh. At the heart of herself, Peggy Carter is a wolf. 

And she is hunting.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons:
> 
> Peggy--grey wolf, Bader  
> Jarvis--tabby cat, Suzan  
> Howard--ruby-throated hummingbird, Sylph  
> Angie--sulfur-crested cockatoo, Peter  
> Colleen--monarch butterfly, Leon  
> Sousa--king cobra, Martine  
> Steve--German Shepard, Linde  
> Bucky--cougar, Scarlett  
> Thompson--peregrine falcon, Willa  
> Krzeminski--Jack Russel terrier, Katrine


End file.
